Many educational institutions and experts have raised the alarm that social media use is dangerous for young people’s well-being and mental health. However, the existing reviews on this question do not provide definite answers, pointing to the problems of causality and heterogeneity in social media use. This paper selects, reviews and discusses empirical studies that more rigorously analyse causality in the field using large samples and objective data over long stretches of time, while overlooking the heterogeneity problem. To this end, these studies use the method of leveraging the ‘natural experiment’ of staggered access to social media across the territory, and the common conclusion found for the US, the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain is that social media harm, on average, young people’s well-being and mental health. In discussing these studies, the present paper suggests a novel theoretical interpretation: social media use becomes harmful because it displaces beneficial activities aimed at achieving future and pro-social goals, so that young people become especially vulnerable to addictive use of social media. The available supporting evidence of causal type is reviewed, again drawn mainly from economics literature. The paper makes thus evident the need for research to integrate different disciplines focused on such a complex and urgent issue.
(submitted paper)
